When the Power Fails

She was always a powerful woman. No matter that she was short and tiny – or as she often sputtered to people who referred to her that way – small and slender.  She packed a wallop despite her diminutive size.

I met Jean when I was a few days over 15 years old. She hired me, with reservations I later learned, to wash dishes in the restaurant she and her husband owned. She was always quick to point out she was the actual owner – SHE had purchased the restaurant to give her husband something to do.  He did most of the cooking; she did most of the arguing. And she kept the books.

For a long time, months, I just tried to stay out of her way and do my job perfectly. Perfectly meant never letting the kitchen run out of plates or the dining room run out of silverware.  Perfectly meant watching with my third eye for the waitresses to set empty coffee pots up on the shelf above the serving window and run quickly to empty the grounds and clean them out, replacing them before the waitresses reached up for them again. Perfectly meant keeping the long chrome shelf where waitresses dumped their dirty dishes as empty as possible, so there would always be room for another load, so there wouldn’t be a thunderous crash of a precarious pile of china.  She scrutinized my work, and I hurried to do what I was supposed to do before she could open her mouth to tell me to do it.

A year later, I was rewarded for my perfection with a 25 cent/hour raise and an increase in the interest she showed in me personally. I ramped up my drive toward perfection.   One Friday night, she suggested that someone else “close” in my place – maybe I would like to go home with her and her husband, swim in their pool.  Would I like to go home with them and swim in their in-ground pool? Did I just die and fly to heaven?  From then on,  I became one of the “golden” few who stopped working Friday nights at 7:30 when the rush was over, sat in the back room together eating dinner and watching All in the Family and then climbed into their blue Volkswagen station wagon’s back seat for the drive to their country home and a late night swim.  Jean and I would sit up into the wee hours, talking in her room. She and her husband lived at different ends of the house.  We shared an interest in psychology, in philosophy, in reading. She’d recommend books and I’d devour them. She talked to me as if I were an adult.  I wished fervently at the time that she could have been my mother  -- my own mother was not interested in any of those things.  In fact, in all the time I knew my mother, I don’t think I ever saw her read a single book. I suspect Jean may also have wished I was her daughter. Her own daughter, a few years old than I, had married a man Jean hated, had a child by him, and was now divorced.

When it was time to apply for college, she urged me to consider an elite private university in the area over the state universities that I could afford and had a better chance of getting in. The carrot she dangled in front of me was an offer to live with her while I was in school – the private university was not more than a few miles from their home.  Her own daughter had not gone to college at all. When I did not get accepted to the university, my devastation was more about my lost opportunity to live in the extra bedroom and pretend I was Jean’s child than anything else.

As much as I idolized Jean, I was also afraid of her.  She was a legend among the regulars who lined the counter every morning for the ease with which she took them on if they said anything that even slightly offended her in the areas of politics, religion, business, and especially “women’s lib”.   She was ready and waiting for anybody – customers, delivery persons, employees – who dared to disagree with her or question her in any way. In addition, she and her husband often fought bitterly in the kitchen, sometimes loudly enough for customers to hear them.  Most of the fights were pretty much nonsense but they were intense and the experience taught me that she was ready to bite with little provocation.   

And bite me she did. The first chomp came when I announced that I was going to marry a man I hadn’t dated for very long…. a man she didn’t think was good enough for me…. a man who was much older than I, a customer who had shown up one day working across the street and took an interest in me. Jean had been in favor of the dates he’d asked me on. I hadn’t displayed much interest in meeting guys since I’d broken it off with my high school boyfriend. My self-esteem was non-existent, so she probably saw his interest as a necessary ego boost for me. She didn’t believe our relationship was going to go anywhere. Surely I was smarter than that.

She was furious when I showed off my engagement ring, given to me after barely six months of dating. The kitchen of the restaurant, which had been so warm and friendly, became frigid.  She barely spoke to me. When I announced a few weeks later that I was resigning with two weeks’ notice, I was officially a persona non grata. Dead in her eyes and banished from her heart.

But that was not the end of it. Our relationship was resurrected once I was divorced from the man she hadn’t wanted me to marry. I was excommunicated again when I went away to film school, and rebirthed one final time a few years later. The details of those banishments and restorations are clear in my memory but not quite ready for public consumption.  They may never be.

Jean is 91 years old now. She lives in an assisted living facility. She no longer drives, plays tennis, or goes to the Atheneum. She’s as feisty as she ever was, and I suspect she tortures her peers and probably some staff.  I’ve spent a lot of time avoiding her over the past 20 years although a perverse sense of loyalty and some fond memories of old times drive me to see her every year or so.  My avoidance is more about my admitted inability to maintain a solid sense of myself in her presence than anything, an inability to stand up to her and say, “I do not agree with you.”   

I saw her recently. It was bizarre. We had set up the time in May. She had forgotten my birthday for the first time in over 40 years, calling me a week after the fact. The conversation had been benign. I felt magnanimous – after all, I told myself, she’s 91 years old. I told her I’d be up her way in July when I had a long weekend; perhaps we could have lunch together. She put down the phone to get her calendar. She acted like she wrote it all down. She repeated it to me -  the month, the day,  the date, the time.  She was looking forward to it. The week arrived. I kept intending to call to make sure we were still “on.” But it was a busy week, and suddenly it was Thursday night. I called, no answer. I left a message on the answering machine reminding her I’d be there the next day for lunch and to call me if she got in at a reasonable hour. She didn’t call. I was on the road at 6 a.m. the next morning, and called her from the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts  just after 9. She acted surprised. She hadn’t listened to my message from the night before, had no recollection that I was coming, even accused me of having made the date with someone else.  Once she settled down, she was pleased to hear from me and yes, she was going to be home around lunchtime, and she’d love to have me join her in the dining room.

By the time I arrived, she’d started a ruckus about not having received my call the night before. She’d decided that another person with the same last name as her had taken my call and had not had the decency to pass along the message. The fact that I’d dialed her number from my contacts list made no difference.  She was irate and self-righteous. I felt like I’d landed on another planet. A few minutes into my time with her, she referred to our phone conversation of the night before. “It was this morning that we spoke,” I reminded her, “not last night.” She looked at me confused. “It was?” Now she did not believe we had spoken earlier that morning.  She repeatedly told me I’d made the lunch date with someone else.  She told me twice the story of how her daughter and son-in-law’s beloved pet had recently died.  She reminisced fondly (and mostly accurately) about old restaurant days. She told me twice that she’d always been proud of me.  After two hours, we embraced, said goodbye and I left, wondering if she would remember that I had been there.  I drove away in a sort of shock, reeling from what I’d seen and heard, not quite believing that this was the same woman I’d acquiesced to for years, the same woman whose opinions had so controlled me.   

There were many people along the way who thought I was better off without Jean’s influence, including my mom, bless her, and others who are likely reading these words and thinking, “Yup, that would be me.”  Before my mom passed away, one afternoon as we sat talking at her bedside in our living room, I told her that every time I saw Jean I had an urge to tell her how wrong I had been in wishing even for a short time that she had been my mother.  My mom looked at me seriously. I could tell she was pleased. “Really?” she asked. “Absolutely, “ I assured her. “I had the best mother all along. Jean doesn’t hold a candle to you.” “That’s really nice to hear.” She seemed surprised. “Thank you for telling me,” mom whispered. I hugged her tightly. “I had to,” I said. “It’s the truth.”

A Private Holiday Between Mother and Child

I expected to miss my mom the most during the winter holidays. After all, holidays were a BIG DEAL, not only when I was growing up but after I became an adult. In all my 53 years before she died, I never missed a single Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday with my mom. My daughter and I and my sister and her family always, always made the trek west and north to our hometown where delicious smells, fireplace warmth, and mother-spoiling awaited us.

What I didn’t expect was the emotional wallop I felt when my birthday came after she passed away. Certainly as a child, my birthday was treated as a special event. In western New York, where spring takes its sweet time arriving, my mid-May birthday often coincided with our first real taste of spring-like weather. The lilacs were opening, sweetly scenting the air, the big trees that dotted our yard were bright green with new leaves, and my favorite lilies of the valley were bursting in the space between the concrete steps leading to our front door. Each morning as I left the house to catch the school bus, I checked the progress of the lilies’ growth, crossing my fingers that by the time May 16 dawned, they would blossom.

Beyond the flowers, what I liked most about my childhood birthdays was the food because I got to pick exactly what I wanted to eat. For as long as I can remember, birthday breakfast was always Canadian bacon and Pillsbury frosted cinnamon rolls. As I’d watch mom pop them out of their cylinder and arrange the raw dough swirls on a cookie sheet, I would practically wriggle in delight at the prospect of their melt-in-my-mouth goodness a mere 18 minutes away. Twenty perhaps if you counted the time it would take to frost them.  My cake request at night was always angel food with mom’s homemade chocolate frosting. I don’t remember the main course – ever – but the day started and ended with sweet joy.

But once I moved away from home to the other side of the state, my birthday became just another work day. I celebrated with my daughter, usually still inviting the Pillsbury Dough Boy to breakfast. We’d go out for dinner, just we two, riding the bus and then the subway from our Queens’ apartment to the West Village and a little Italian basement restaurant called Carmella’s. We almost always chose the simmering and delectable manicotti while dessert was a fruit tart pastry, artfully topped with my favorite raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries. I could hardly wait for it to be placed in front of me. And if I had a weekend birthday, we’d plan to do something fun like shopping, riding roller coasters at Great Adventure Amusement Park, seeing a movie, or in later years, attending a Broadway show.

Sure, mom was always the first to call me in the morning to wish me a happy birthday, her voice full of love 350 miles away. She always sent a box of presents in the mail that arrived at least two days ahead of time, usually at work because she knew I’d be there to collect them. One year in the late 1990’s, she picked a bouquet of lilies of the valley from between her front steps, carefully placed them in water-filled plastic tubes florists use to keep roses fresh, and then carefully placed the plastic tubes upright in a wide-mouthed jar. Somehow she rigged her packaging so the lilies were protected on all sides from being crushed; everything was tripled padded so no apparent water leakage would occur and she expressed mailed them to me at work. I will never forget my complete surprise – no, shock – and gratitude as the heavenly smell of lilies of the valley wafted out of her highly creative packaging. I picked up the phone immediately – “You are amazing,” I laughed, delighted as I imagined her executing her plan.

There was one more birthday I would be in her company.  The spring mom had surgery for ovarian cancer, I spent my birthday with her in a chemotherapy suite. It was her second ever chemo session and it was an all-day affair. We packed our lunch at home in the morning and ate sandwiches together as she sat tethered to an IV, poison pulsing through her bloodstream. I joked with her urging that she visualize the poison munching on the errant cancer cells that remained in her body.  She kept saying that it was a terrible way for me to spend my birthday. I considered it an honor and said so.

I had three more birthdays before she passed away. Because I would have seen her for Mother’s Day the week before, travelled to her again at Memorial Day, and joined her for her June birthday, I stayed home for my own, resuming my usual celebratory activity with my daughter.  

So I was unprepared for the wave of melancholia that crashed over me my first birthday without mom. Except for the chemo year, I’d had probably thirty birthdays without her. Why did I feel like pulling the shades, crawling in my bed, and sobbing?  I had plans with my daughter for dinner and a show. It was a Tuesday. This was the norm. I wasn’t supposed to feel this way until Thanksgiving. But I was bereft. 

It was the same the following year and the next and the next. I’d wake up morose and it would linger all day. The days were pleasant enough – often lunch out with a beloved colleague, dinner out with my sweet daughter, a couple of great shopping blitzes, and Broadway plays every single year. The calendars I save as a record of my life document all that. Still forlorn lingered.

I was cleaning out a cupboard of books this year, part of my effort to de-stuff myself, when I came across my baby book. My mother documented my birth, noting that her labor began at 4:45 p.m. on May 16. She went to the hospital at 5:45 p.m., and I was delivered at 11:47 p.m. that same night. I laughed to myself thinking of her short labor – even then it seems I didn’t want to be too much of a bother. She wrote that she had a pudendal block as an anesthetic and that my birth was by axis-traction. Basically that means the doctor used forceps to drag me out into the world. We went home from the hospital six days later or so the baby book reports.

I pondered this in the days approaching my birthday. I listened to the tape I made of my mom talking to me the fall before she died. On the tape, she reiterated, as she had many times throughout my life, how much she wanted to have me. I was her fourth pregnancy over a ten-year period after marrying my father. She’d miscarried three times before a miracle drug of the times helped her to carry to term. I thought about how emotionally and physically intimate giving birth is. A birth is an event that is ultimately experienced only between a mother and her child. Others are there, maybe even in the room, cheering, supporting, and celebrating the big moment. But in the end, a birth day is a private holiday. I have one of those “a-ha” moments when the intellectual and visceral collide in understanding. I understand why I have felt so unfinished on the day of my birth. My sole (and soul) partner in our profound holiday dance is gone.    

Mother's Day Reflections from an Orphan

I wanted to write about my mom this Mother’s Day. I loved her dearly. She gave so much to me and I miss her incredibly. But as I have repeatedly stalled out over the words the past few days, I finally accepted that perhaps I was just not ready to do so. 

I have never put much emphasis on Mother’s Day, at least not as far as me being the mother is concerned. I’ve always considered it to be one of those Hallmark holidays that obligate people to spend money or feel guilty if they don’t. It’s filled with imperatives. I do not want to be feted out of duty. I’d rather be treated to lunch in the middle of March “just because” than to be paraded into a restaurant on Mother’s Day with the rest of the throngs because the calendar and big business dictates it. This position, however, has never stopped me from trying to meet other people’s needs on Mother’s Day.

Then

My first memory of trying to make my mother happy on Mother’s Day was when I was about 8. I decided that my sister and I should pool our allowances (saved faithfully week after week in our homemade Tupperware banks) and convince our father to take mom to Lake Placid for a weekend. Lake Placid, I knew, had been their honeymoon destination, so I figured it had to be a nice place. The reason for this particular gift was to give her a break from my sister and me because we fought constantly. Mom just hated that. “I can stand noise,” she always said, “but I can’t stand fighting.”  Dad was only too happy to agree to the plan especially since it involved a road trip, although I’m sure it cost him a bundle more than what we had to offer up as payment.  However, since affordability was never a barrier to his good time, he willingly complied and whisked her away.

My last memory of trying to bring my mother happiness on Mother’s Day was the spring before she passed away. It had become my practice to fly her and my brother to New York City for Mother’s Day, but that year she was much too weak to tolerate airports and hassles. So, my daughter and I trekked across the state to spend the day with her, my brother, and our aunt and uncle. Photos taken of her that day provide evidence that she was already beginning to fade away from us.

The following year, she was gone. My brother, having lost his mother and his home as a result, had been moved into a group home; my aunt, mom’s older sister, wept much of the time, in disbelief and grief.  So my attention turned to their needs. I felt driven to show up, to “be there” for them, and to try to make the day as easy as possible. Mother’s Day now included a visit to the cemetery, bouquets of roses, mom’s favorite, lovingly placed at her grave, and dinner out with the survivors. Mom had already abandoned them – I couldn’t do the same.  My daughter understood and urged me to do what I needed to do.  She understands internal conflict.

And now

This year was to be my sixth Mother’s Day as an orphan. I decided to stay home. Well, not so much stay home as come home because I was actually across the state with my brother as the weekend began. My sweet daughter had announced weeks before as we compared schedules her intention to block Mother’s Day off to spend with me. Although we connect most days by text or email, we don’t get to see each other as often as we’d like. It’s rare that we end up with the same day free. So this was an offer not to be refused and with her, obligation is not even a consideration. I drove home Saturday night to be with her.

Sunday unfolds into sunshine. I pick her up at her apartment in the city early – 7:30 a.m. which means I am up at 6.  She could have taken the train but fetching her means more time together so I am totally up for the trip no matter what the hour or how little sleep I’ve had. The conversation begins the minute she climbs in the car, and it doesn’t stop. At home, we make breakfast together, fresh blueberry pancakes, gluten-free, and we laugh over the chai lattes we bought on the way here. The day morphs into stunningly gorgeous. We leave the house and walk on a nearby winding parkway that closes to motorized traffic for eight glorious Sundays in the spring. I have always wanted to do this, but weather and my constant cross-state trips have conspired against it until today. We share the pavement with bikes, joggers, strollers, and other walkers.  The trees are in full bloom and often shade the road; the river for which the parkway is named, is swollen and rushes over the rocks creating music in the background. We talk non-stop about our jobs, what we want for the future, vacation plans, current events, men in her life, how our shopping ban is going, and our observations about how people we encounter with children are interacting with them. Five-and-a-half miles later, in only slight pain, we leave the parkway, stop at a yuppie deli in my village, order sandwiches and eat outside on sidewalk tables. We top it off with gelato and refuse to feel guilty.  We are comfortable in our jeans (me) and yoga pants (her) and we are together. No reservations necessary.

As we sit on the sidewalk, she suddenly asks, “So how are you doing today?”  This is not a random or rhetorical question. She means, “Are you ok since this is Mother’s Day and grammie is dead?” She’s probably been wondering when and how to fit this in during our conversation which has now spanned several hours. A part of her truly wants an open and authentic relationship with me and by definition, this must include both the good and the not-so-good. The other part of her hopes I’m still the mom who can handle everything, including my emotions with aplomb.    

Knowing my daughter, I should have expected it, but I admit the question catches me off-guard. I hesitate, not quite knowing what to say. I go for the truth. “Well,” I say carefully. “I know it is Mother’s Day, and I am aware that my own mom is not here. But did I wake up this morning and have my first thought be about what I don’t have? No, I did not.  I confess it wasn’t even my second thought. What I did think was I’m so happy I’m going to see my kid today. My mind was on what I do have.”  I hasten to add that I do miss Grammie, almost every day. But this year I am at peace. I am home with my own precious child.  And it is a perfect day.

Mom's Christmas Cookies

Christmas has always been the hands-down winner of the My Favorite Holiday vote. I’ve loved everything about it for as long as I can remember (except for the real-tree-fire-hazards of my early childhood).

When I was small, there would always come a day in the endless set of days between Thanksgiving and Christmas when my mom would pull out her big old Mixmaster.  She would announce that today we were going to bake cookies, and my sister’s and my eyes would light up with happiness. The first job was to mix up her renowned sour cream sugar cookies. That dough had to chill for what seemed like hours until it was stiff enough to roll out. So after the dough was deposited in the refrigerator and covered with a dish towel, we got to work making “Spritz” butter cookies. My sister and I, decked out in matching aprons made by our grandmother, traded off cracking the eggs, being careful not to massacre the shell or lose any of the unwanted egg white in the bowl of ingredients, lest our mother (the perfectionist) decide we were too young to be trusted with the job. We watched intently as she loaded the pastry tube with the yellow dough and perfectly pressed out wreaths and trees and poinsettias. If we promised to be neat, we got to carefully sprinkle the red and green sugars (no such thing as blue and purple and pink back then) on her creations, and press little cinnamon rounds where a wreath bow or tree star or poinsettia cyathium belonged. It was then that I decided that cinnamon was my absolute favorite flavor, and I probably snuck more than I planted in place.

Those delicious cookies baked quickly so we didn’t have to delay gratification too long to get the first yummy bite of Christmas. Then it would be lunch time, and after that we’d pepper her with constant teasing, “Is the dough ready yet?” until finally – finally – she’d declare it firm enough, and the real fun began. She’d get out her pastry cloth and flour it lightly, encase the old wooden rolling pin in its cloth, and deftly roll out the dough. My sister and I got to cut out the cookies – trees and stars and bells and Santas – and place them carefully on the cookie sheets, being mindful not to alter their shape with our small and sometimes clumsy hands. The best part was after they were baked, when mom mixed confectionary sugar, butter, and a little bit of milk into frosting. The privilege of frosting the cookies was always hers and she did it perfectly, carefully moving the frosting from the middle out to the edges, as neat as can be. Once the frosting was completed, she’d set it down and then my sister and I got to decorate again. This time, in addition to the red and green, we had yellow sugar and chocolate & multi-color “jimmies”, red cinnamon rounds, and silver balls to create our masterpieces. We still had to be neat about it. My mom was very particular – trees had to be green (though a little red as an accent was ok) and stars had to be yellow, and I guess she wasn’t fussy about the bells or Santas.

I still remember the first time I nervously frosted a cookie myself – I was probably about 12 or 13 – and I was determined that it would look as perfect as my mom’s beautiful creations.  

Mom’s cookies gradually developed a following outside of her immediate family. Everyone loved them and she never failed to deliver. When she was sick with cancer and the holidays were approaching, she made cookies on her better days and froze them so she’d have them when she wanted to start giving them away. After she passed away in January 2006, cleaning out her freezer, I uncovered a Tupperware container filled with bells and stars. I brought them home with me and put them in my freezer. Along with them came a couple of pie crusts and a cool whip container filled with her chicken stock. For almost five years, I dodged them as other things came and went in the freezer.

This year at Thanksgiving, with family coming for the first time for the holiday in New York, I needed to make room in the freezer for other items. Everything came under scrutiny. Out went the old frozen veggies and fruit that I hadn’t gotten around to using. Out went the boxes of Girl Scout thin mint cookies I bought years ago when my daughter still ate them. Out went the too-strong coffee from I can’t remember where or when. I checked out the container of chicken stock. Definitely time to ditch that. Out it went. Not too painful. I checked out the pie crusts. Freezer burned. Plus under the one that she definitely made, I discovered two “store-bought” crusts – bogus! Out they went. No tears shed.

The cookies were left. I argued with myself – these are FIVE YEARS old. You’ll make more. These can’t be any good. Stop being so sentimental. You’ll make more. You’ll make more. You’ll make more.

I stood there alone in my kitchen. Nobody else was around to urge me one way or another. I remembered walking into mom’s kitchen every other weekend during almost the entire last year of her life. Though she was usually lying on the couch in the living room when I arrived, exhausted from chemo and the effort to keep the house and everything going for my brother, the kitchen counter almost always held her large round Tupperware container filled with frosted, decorated sour cream cookies just for me because I loved them. Those cookies were an ongoing act of mother-love. The evidence sat on my shelf. They still connect me with her.

I put the cookies back in the freezer.

Don't Mess With Him - You'll Answer to Me

Forty-eight years ago on November 20, I woke up in the middle of the night to find my grandmother in my double bed next to me. “Your mother went to the hospital,” she reported, when I wondered what she was doing there. A few hours later, the phone rang, and my father announced, “You have a little brother.” My sister and I were ecstatic. A boy was unusual in my family so this would be a novel experience. I had little idea at the time how novel it was to be.

I was 9 years old and this was my first real experience with a baby. My brother was pudgy and cute and he didn’t cry very much. I learned to change and feed him and didn’t think anything about it when he didn’t crawl until he was over a year old, take a step until almost two, and wouldn’t eat table food until he was four.  When I was 12, a “friend” told me that another girl who was the “neighborhood nasty” had said that my family was trying to hide my brother because there was something wrong with him. She whispered the word, “mongoloid.”  I was crushed. Why would we try to hide such a cute little guy? In a rare expression of feeling, I went home crying and told my parents who reassured me that the “neighborhood nasty” was being true to her reputation and that they certainly were not trying to hide him.

I recovered but became super over-protective. More than once, seeing behavior that led me to believe another kid was enroute to taking advantage of him, I sped through the house, leaped out the door and screamed at those kids to stop whatever it was they were doing. And over the years, I perfected a glare that warned, “Don’t mess with him or you’ll answer to me.”  I still pull it out from time to time.  

My brother has provided my family and those who know him well with 48 years of adventure, laughs, and occasional high blood pressure. Although incapable of distinguishing between left and right, up and down, or over and under, especially in moments when I need him to follow directions because I have my thumb in a dike and can’t move, he can hook up a VCR/DVD player in no time flat. My mother once stared in disbelief at his handiwork when she realized that he had switched his broken VCR with her working VCR without her knowledge. He also is smart enough to have figured out that if he removes a certain piece from the top of the doors in his group home, the bells that signal someone’s arrival and/or exit will be deactivated. He also figured out how to de-alarm the fire system because it made too much noise and awakened him in the middle of the night for fire drills.

My brother can find nothing you want him to find, but he has perfected his disappearing act so nobody can find him! Trust me when I say he’s good at it. Even the bloodhounds would agree.  

    

My brother says the funniest things. Every time he walks through the front door of his group home, he calls out, “Oh honey, I’m home!” as if he were on the set of Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. Although some things he says are clear, his speech is often difficult to understand. Since many words sound the same coming out of his mouth, it’s often a guessing game to figure out what he is saying. Sometimes he helps us by spelling (yes, you read that correctly). He tells me that somebody at his group home made him a strawberry lello cake for his birthday. A lello cake, I think, my mind quickly making associations. A yellow cake? No, he says, a LELLO cake, J-E-L-L-O. Ah, a strawberry jello cake.  He tells me about a DVD he wants, Wicka. Wicka, I think, drawing an absolute blank. Wicker? Wicked? I try a few variations and he’s only frustrated with my inability to get it. “F-L-I-C-K-A” he spells as if I am daft. Oh!  Flicka, I say, triumphantly. Yes, “Wicka” he repeats. Okay.

My brother has unbelievable rhythm and all the right moves which he has learned from movies and Sha Na Na.  He is also as light on his feet and as debonair as Fred Astaire. He plays no favorites on the dance floor and the girls all love him. The staff at ARC refers to his harem with a laugh. Look for the crowd on the dance floor- my brother will be in the middle of it. He dances every dance and will be the last one on the floor at the end of the night, bowing graciously to the band or the DJ in thanks before he makes his grand exit.

My brother is meticulous about some things – a slob about others. On the one hand, his ability to fold clothes rivals that of any GAP employee. He even folds his dirty laundry as if it were going straight to a drawer instead of the laundry bin. On the other hand, his room is littered with random papers, empty juice bottles, and lone unmatched socks. It drives me insane.  But as I stand in a grocery store pondering the store brand vs. a name brand, he is busy straightening up the cans or boxes on the shelves - perfectly.

My brother takes great photographs and he bowls a better game than I do almost every time.

My brother walks at least 3 steps behind no matter how slowly I go. “Can’t you walk a little faster, D,” I’ll sputter in exasperation when I’m in a hurry. “Come on feet, hurry up,” he’ll command, immediately changing my mood from frustrated to laughing.  

My brother has a memory like an elephant. He remembers that I had spinach pie at a restaurant a year before and has in mind to order the same thing when we go back. He remembers the one DVD or video that was on his Christmas list that you couldn’t find/buy. At the mention of a long-dead relative, he’ll tell you the year of his/her birth (even if it was in the 1890s), and what their phone number was when they were alive – even if they died 20 years ago. But he doesn’t always remember to comb his hair, change his socks, or put on a belt.

I picked my brother up on Saturday morning, November 20, from his group home in western New York to head back to NYC where we would celebrate Thanksgiving and his birthday. I went in his room to check on his packing. For seven days, he had neatly (think GAP) assembled 7 pair of underwear, 10 undershirts, 9 pair of socks, 12 pair of long pants, and 3 shirts. It was hard to not laugh. I edited the pants and increased the shirts and before long, we were on our way. As we pulled out of the driveway, he looked at me, grinned, and said, “Hit the road, Jack.”

Somewhere between Dansville and Corning, he peered out the windshield up at the clear blue sky, then settled back in his seat. “Well, mom,” he said. “My birthday is today. I am 48 years old.” A lump threatened my throat. I promised my mom moments before she drew her last breath that I would take care of him. I glanced over at my passenger. “I’m sure mom knows it’s your birthday today, honey,” I said. “And I’m sure she is happy because she knows we are on our way to New York City together.” He reached over and patted my shoulder reassuringly.  “I am happy too,” he said.